Living in “Bomb Time” Ep. 01
Studies this Week say Greenland is Lost
It’s Official, We are now Living in “Bomb Time”
Quick, what’s the difference between a heat ray and climate change?
It’s a trick question because there is no difference. The only thing different about them is the timescale they happen on. With the heat ray you point it at something, pull the trigger and watch it burst into flames in a second. Because that’s what happens in the physical world when you dump a lot of thermal energy on something very quickly. It bursts into flames.
Ever watch footage from one of old atomic bomb tests where they record the typical houses reacting to an atomic blast? You can see the house literally “flash ignite” as the massive thermal pulse from the bomb washes over it. That is what happens to things that get hit by “heat rays”. They absorb massive amounts of thermal energy, very quickly, and start burning. We understand how that process works very clearly.
Now, image you could slow down the rate of time. Imagine that every tenth of a second of “bomb time” is equal to twenty years of “human time”. At that time rate, the one second of “bomb time” that it takes the house to burst into flames becomes 200 years of human time.
If someone from the future came and told you that the house you just bought is going to burst into flames 200 years from now, would you move? Even if you believed the visitor from the future, would you take out insurance for a disaster that far in the future? Or would you just write a note for the next owners of the house and then live out the rest of your life without doing anything? After all, not doing anything is so much cheaper and easier than trying to avert something that isn’t going to happen until long after you are dead. Most of us are going to choose option two.
Two hundred years is a very long time in human time. The difference between 1820 and 2020 is roughly eight generations. It’s really difficult for us to work on things that happen in that time scale. Our lives are just too short, not enough happens in any one lifetime to really feel any urgency about a problem.
However, whether we see it, or not, we are now living in “bomb time”.
Climate Action Resistors (CARS) have developed a new argument lately for why we don’t need to do anything about CO2 emissions and rising global temperatures. It relies heavily on past climate graphs like this one:
Which shows the earth’s temperature flux over the last 800,000 years. When you look “at the big picture”, they argue that the current warming trend is no different than what has happened multiple times in the earth’s past. As is clearly shown on the chart.
“Look at how sharply temperatures went up at the end of the last Ice Age” they point out. “That wasn’t caused by humans” goes the argument. Which leads to the inevitable conclusion that what is happening now is no different than what has happened in the past. As they see it: we are not responsible for it, there is nothing we can do about it, and spending piles of money to “combat” it is just a liberal power grab.
When you look at the chart that sounds like a winning argument. It’s easy to see that there have been numerous periods in the last 800K years when the earth’s temperature suddenly increases and shifts from ice age to temperate. However, they are leaving something really important out from their argument and that is the rate at which the warming is happening this time.
Models predict that Earth will warm between 2 and 6 degrees Celsius in the next century. When global warming has happened at various times in the past two million years, it has taken the planet about 5,000 years to warm 5 degrees. The predicted rate of warming for the next century is at least 20 times faster. This rate of change is extremely unusual.
In human time the next century seems like a long period. Of all the people born today, only a handful will live to be 100. But because global warming is happening so much faster than normal, because we are living in “bomb time”, they will be able to see its effects happening throughout their lives.
They are going to live in a “fast forward” version of a normal inter-glacial warming period in which 200 years of normal warming is compressed into each 10 years of their lives. In the first 50 years of their lives they are going to experience warming that in previous natural cycles would take 1,000 years to happen.
That rate of change is going to have consequences. At the very least, it calls into question the likelihood that we will be able to maintain our current civilization and population levels. Contributing to that will be a melting Greenland.
‘Canary in the coal mine’: Greenland ice has shrunk beyond return, study finds
Climate Scientists Sound the Alarm: Warming Greenland Ice Sheet Passes Point of No Return
Going, Going … Gone: Greenland’s Melting Ice Sheet Passed a Point of No Return in the Early 2000s
Greenland’s ice sheet has melted beyond the point of “no return”. This most likely means at least five feet of sea level rise by 2100, just from Greenland. This is the “fast melt scenario” I mention in my piece It’s Raining in Antarctica and the Arctic is on Fire. It is not good news, it means that sea level rise is probably going to happen faster than our social\cultural ability to react to it. It means that many of the world's port cities are probably going to drown in the next 80 years. The loss of investment, infrastructure, and capabilities is going to be profound.
In the future, when they look back at climate change, they are probably going to say that the “climate bomb” went off between 2010 and 2020. At some point in that decade we went over the tipping point and locked in 5,000 years of normal climate change into roughly the next 200 years. For the rest of our lives, and for the lives of the next eight generations, we are going to live in the 20X fast forward of “bomb time”.
Surviving it, navigating it, and thriving in it are going to be massive challenges. We still have a decade, maybe two, before the world we created in the 20th century starts collapsing. After that, our children will be on their own in a world of hyper-rapid, hyper-fluctuating climate change. History is going to judge us harshly.
Welcome to Bomb Time.
